The theme of this year’s Women’s Week is “Beyond Borders.” When I was asked to write a guest editorial for this special section of The Daily Utah Chronicle, I decided I wanted it to be a kind of meditation on this theme. I don’t want to use my position as chair of the planning committee to advance an argument about what I think the theme means; rather, I want to suggest some possibilities that might fuel the imaginations of all of us who take part in this celebration or who wonder what Women’s Week is all about. After all, even a new TV ad campaign for a Suzuki automobile tells us that “it’s not about answering the questions; it’s about questioning the answers.”
“Try to stay inside the lines?” I’m sitting cross legged in one of my favorite places on the living room floor and I’m probably three or four years old. My mother has given me a new coloring book to add to my ever expanding collection. My crayons are neatly arranged in their box. Somehow I already know that chaos can be avoided by keeping the waxy sticks of color in rows of light to dark, yellow to orange to red, light greens to darker hues of greens and blues.
And now my mother is teaching me to impose yet another form of order on my activity. All around me there is order. “Stay inside the lines,” she tells me. Meticulously, I try to follow her admonition, becoming concerned that I might make an irreparable mistake of some sort if I stray outside the box that is the black borderline of the image I am coloring on the page open before me.
What are borders for? If my coloring book example is at all typical, then it seems we begin to learn answers to this question from an early age.
Simply put, borders contain, confine, separate, demarcate, categorize. And, in performing these sorts of functions they give us a kind of comfort. If we know where things and people belong, we don’t have to think too much about where to place them, what they’re supposed to do, how they’re supposed to look. We don’t have to worry about any of the fears associated with the activity of wondering. Our imaginations don’t really have to become engaged. We don’t have to be creative. In fact, we don’t even really have to think. How comforting. How utterly boring. And how dangerous.
We should wonder what borders really mean?the physical, geographic kind?when it becomes clearer to us all the time that the local and the global are inseparable. Yet, we still cling to the fiction that borders are good for us and should continue to be recognized. In fact, in the wake of Sept. 11, “we” struggle to come up with inventive ways to make “our” country impermeable to another tragedy, forgetting that protection from “outsiders” also opens us to the risk of impoverishment.
On the one hand, I suppose it’s obvious that borders between one city and the next, one state and the next, one nation and the next, serve important political and legal functions. But how far are we to extend the logic of the border as container?one people “protected” from another, one culture’s “purity” kept safe?
Let’s consider what a celebration called Women’s Week is all about. If we assume it asks us to learn about so called “women’s issues,” what are these issues? Where are the borders to be drawn, if they are to be drawn at all? Which women’s lives does such a week celebrate? What experiences does it ask us to ponder? Can we even speak about women’s concerns, interests or aspirations without also contemplating the complex ways in which these also involve questions of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, socioeconomic class and sexuality?
It seems there are more borders than we thought possible that must be transgressed in the interest of promoting social change around gender and sexuality.
Since borders function as containers, or as spaces of confinement, then the idea of “keeping women on a pedestal” as a way of honoring and respecting women for wifely, domestic roles should be examined.
A pedestal is a pretty precarious place when you think about it. Imagine trying to balance on a narrow platform that stands high above the ground (especially in stiletto heels). Your feet keep slipping off, so that you face the possibility of falling to your death if you step “out of bounds.”
In other words, if you refuse the gendered behavior that is expected of your sex, you risk a variety of punishments. On the other hand, if you conform to the narrow confines of the pedestal you can remain protected. Or, so the myth goes.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not indicting people who choose to live according to traditional expectations for their gender; rather, I’m both indicting the practice of making “choices” unreflectively and interrogating the concept “choice” itself. When an individual decides to explore the territory beyond the confines of the pedestal (I think men face containment and confinement of specific kinds as well), it might do us some good to honor and respect that decision to transgress. Imagine what we might discover?
In one of the classes I teach, students read a collection of essays by Riki Anne Wilchins called “Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender.” As a male to female transsexual Wilchins’ is concerned about borders, specifically about transgressions of the borders constructed around male/female, masculine/feminine and hetero/homo.
In one essay she asks us to consider what’s going on when a person who identifies as a male is standing outside on a street and sees an apparent female walking away. This “male” notes that this “female” is attractive and experiences sexual desire, observing (to quote Wilchins) “tight blue jeans, cute butt, long swaying blond hair.” Then, something unsettling happens: “Blue jeans-cute-butt-blond-hair” turns to cross the street and the (presumably) male observer sees the full beard and flat chest that marks “cute butt” as a male. What’s going on? The observer is forced, both by the gender order and by prohibitions against same sex desire, to reframe both what “he” has just seen as well as what it means. If the observer chooses to conform to heteronormativity, this body that was regarded as sexually attractive from one point of view suddenly can only be seen as aesthetically pleasant to look at, not as sexually desirable.
This scenario should at least make us wonder about the borders around gender and sexuality. How “natural” are they? What is “normal”? How many masculinities and femininities exist and what awaits us when we think beyond the trap of our two gendered world? How many genders and sexualities might we actually find if we step outside of the boxes we’ve confined ourselves within? What if we let our crayons make a few stray marks outside the lines?
While we participate in the events of Women’s Week this year we might not get much of a chance to consider what some of us undoubtedly regard as the esoteric world of the transsexual.
I raise the transgression of gender mostly as a mechanism to help us color outside of the box for a moment. If nothing else, at least try to consider Women’s Week an organized opportunity for all of us to disrupt our nicely ordered ways of thinking about who we are and what “issues” we should concern ourselves with.
This is a chance to explore new landscapes. Borders exist to categorize and confine and thus can function as prisons for the figures on either side. That’s why we might want to think, if even for a week, about how to move beyond them.
Professor Debra Burrington is Chairwoman of the Women’s Week Planning Committee and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Program.